


The Gods Went North

by Pixeled



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Death, Guilt, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Remorse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-10-01 21:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20411020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixeled/pseuds/Pixeled





	The Gods Went North

Veld’s hands shook. They never shook.

His Felicia.

Dead.

His baby girl.

He’d counted down the hours since she began to wheeze. Since they’d given her the morphine.

“If you can’t save her, please take her,” he’d begged the gods.

Veld never begged the gods.

Now, at her funeral, he stood with his hands shaking as strangers poured into the too-small room.

He remembered when his wife died, how he’d had no words at her funeral. This was no different, but for different reasons. He didn’t trust himself to speak. His thoughts were a dark swirl of condemning the gods. They had an expression for this—death happened to the pure when the gods went north, when they’d fled.

To Veld, the gods had never smiled on him.

Felicia—Elfé—had been his reason. When he believed in nothing else, there was her. When he lost his wife, her mother, she kept smiling through the pain. When he’d lost his arm, she had faith. Her strength kept him going. Her strength made him believe. Her strength made him get his new arm when he thought a piece of him had died with it.

Her strength had failed her.

He couldn’t bear to bury her. And yet here he was.

He drove behind the hearse, his eyes burning with unshed tears.

As they lowered her into the ground and covered her grave with dirt he felt hollow.

As the small crowd dispersed, Veld knelt at her fresh grave, touched his hand to the little placard with her name. Felicia Dragoon.

When he stood, the tears in his eyes spilled over. No one was there to see him cry. Everyone had left. Everyone had said their goodbyes.

Or so he thought.

As he turned to go back to his car, the tears still clinging to his eyelashes in fat drops, he froze in his steps.

There, standing just on the threshold of concrete and grass was a man he’d thought had died.

“Vince?” he breathed.

One of his many regrets was sending him away. But he’d been scared. He, who was never scared, was scared by how much he’d loved this man. He’d vowed, after his wife died, that he’d never love anyone again, and so it surprised him how he’d fallen for the kid with the big unusual red eyes. He’d grown into a man before his very eyes, and he’d become so important to him when he’d pushed Felicia away to live her own life, so when he’d nearly gotten himself killed, he made the decision to send him away.

He didn’t know he’d sent him to die.

Years later he’d found out that he sent him to a fate worse than death. The torture and the pain he’d read in those reports haunted him to this very day.

He felt guilt every day that he’d been allowed to leave his life in the city behind, watched idly from afar as everything fell apart and had been rebuilt.

He’d thought . . . he’d thought Vincent was still sleeping in his coffin in that nightmarish manor. Sleeping his eternity of pain away.

Veld had had a good life living in retirement in the mountains with Felicia for years. They’d had a quiet existence. All while Vincent experienced anguish.

It was too good for him.

Losing her was his due. His penance for being what he was—a monster.

He wasn’t a good man.

His wife, she saw the good in him. But she didn’t know the true life he led. She didn’t know anything. She’d died not knowing that he killed without mercy. That the same mouth she kissed was the very same that twisted in a smile when he drove bullets into the hearts of his fellow man.

It was different with Vincent.

Vincent, when he met him at sixteen, was already a killer. He was a monster, just like him. And yet there was an innocence to him. A vulnerability. A sensitivity.

As the years progressed, that vulnerability and sensitivity never went away.

Vincent had loved him in a way he’d never been loved. Vincent knew the kind of man he was and he still loved him anyway.

Veld had taken his honest heart and ripped it out before Professor Hojo had ever shot him in it.

But Veld had had his secrets. He’d never told Vincent about his daughter.

He’d never loved Vincent the way he deserved.

That was one of his many sins.

Vincent was looking at him with an unreadable expression now. Like a blank wall, no emotion. It pained Veld and he deserved it.

“I thought I dreamt that you came to wake me up,” Vincent said. “I thought it was a cruel nightmare.”

“Vince, I’m so sorry. For everything.” It sounded like bullshit.

“You never told me you had a daughter.”

“An omission. I told you I had been married. I had a daughter.” Saying “had” broke his heart.

“She was only a few years older than me,” Vincent said. His voice could have had some blame in it, but it did not.

Veld studied Vincent’s face. It had been over thirty years, and he looked the same age he had been when he was sent away. Twenty-seven. His hair was longer, and now his arm, too, was replaced with metal, but he looked the same. The same but different. His eyes held so much. To look in them made Veld feel the weight of his guilt, this haunting face of a youth that should not be. His face was a reminder of what Veld had done—a ghost in physical form.

Veld was an old man now. His hair was streaked with gray. His face held many new lines that Vincent wouldn’t have seen. And yet when Vincent looked at him, he saw the reflection of the man he’d once been.

“I will always hate myself for sending you away,” Veld said. It felt cheap in his mouth, like a lie he’d told himself so many times he’d come to believe it. In truth, he’d been glad to send Vincent away that day. Over thirty years ago on that day his heart, while heavy, felt lighter when Vincent slammed the door and walked out of his life. “The gods went north that day.”

Vincent blinked, the wall of his cold heart like a shield.

“Never put much stock in the gods. They toy with us. They watch us suffer. Never would have expected you to cite the gods . . . I thought you were dead,” Vincent said. “When they told me you retired, I didn’t believe it. I had to see it. For myself. I didn’t know about your daughter until I read where you went.”

“Death is too kind for Veld Dragoon. Still, it should be me in the ground and not Felicia.”

“You’re not dead. And the gods—the gods aren’t returning. We make our own destiny.”

“You haven’t aged a day over twenty-seven,” Veld sighed. “If anything, you’re a god.”

“Then I’ve gone north.”


End file.
